When It Rains, It Snowdens

WILL MITT RUN AGAIN OR JUST HIS MONEY OFFSHORE?

TURNING TURTLE IN TORTOLA, BVI:

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

MODERATE VOICE COLUMNIST

 

Mitt Romney made offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands household words.

But even Willard might blush at how much money the BVI took in last year.

That’s right, while I was eating cheese and bread, my neighbors 40 miles to the north were raking in $92 billion in 2013.

That’s more than Brazil and India combined, but less than the United States, China and Russia did individually.

In fact, little old Road Town, Tortola, where the fresh smell of the Caribbean Sea is around every corner – lost the bronze to Russia by only $2 billion – making them a close fourth in “foreign direct investment” worldwide.

In case you’re wondering, Brazil brought in $63 billion and India netted $28 billion. The world’s biggest economy, the United States, took in $159 billion last year, while China took in $127 billion and Russia got $94 billion.

The BVI government says its country is not a tax dodger’s paradise. But with 500,000 shell companies established just last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) said it discovered “clear evidence of financial fraud” in 2,500 documents it examined.

At least 60 percent of the British Virgin Islands’ revenues come from offshore account fees, so there is little wonder why that Caribbean dependency is seeking to crack down on journalists who publish leaked confidential financial information.

Shell company registrations fell by 23 percent in the final quarter of 2013 after the ICIJ made its disclosure. Le Monde newspaper reported earlier this year that the BVI was concerned it would lose its confidential clients to Hong Kong and Singapore.

 Now that a bill has passed the BVI’s House of Assembly mandating that people who leak or share the names of secret investors face a sentence of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine – it only needs the signatue of British-appointed Governor Boyd McCleary to become law.

This Freedom FROM Information Act from a country that only made incest a crime in the 1980s – and is now proposing to make child pornography illegal in this The Year of Our Zombie Apocalypse – 2014.

The United Nations and the Group of 20 Leading Economies (G20) say they want to put pressure on “non-cooperative jurisdictions” like the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands because they say such notorious tax havens have sucked an estimated $20 trillion out of the world economy.

The lack of transparency in Tortola made it easier for jailed fraudster Achilleas Kallakis to pull off the biggest mortgage con in history – worth an estimated $750 million. Kallakis used BVI shell companies to hide his fraud from lax British and Irish banks.

The BVI government’s clients also include Scot Young, a London property magnate and “fixer” for deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Dundee-born Young is in jail for contempt of court for concealing assets from his ex-wife.Young's lawyer, to whom he signed over power of attorney, appears to control interests in a Road Town company that owns a potentially lucrative Moscow development with a value estimated at $100 million.

India, Pakistan, Iran, China, Thailand and former communist states are also in the running in the BVI shell game lottery. The Cayman and Cook Islands are represented in the 2,500 documents, but most of the offshore accounts are in Road Town, Tortola, BVI.

Since the 1980’s, the BVI has attracted more than one million offshore entities. Here is a brief list of the main offenders:

• Denise Eisenberg-Rich of the United States, the former wife of commodities trader Marc Rich, who was controversially pardoned by President Clinton on tax evasion charges. Eisenberg-Rich put $144M into the Dry Trust, formed in the Cook Islands.

• Dictator's daughter Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, a provincial governor in the Phillippines, is the eldest daughter of former President Ferdinand Marcos, known for deep pockets of corruption.

•A senator's husband in Canada. Anthony “Tony” Merchant, a Saskatchewan lawyer, deposited more than $800,000 into an offshore trust. Merchant paid fees in cash and demanded that written communication to be "kept to a minimum.”

• Jean-Jacques Augier of France was Francois Hollande’s 2012 election campaign co-treasurer. Augier set up a Cayman Islands-based distributor in Beijing with a 25 percent partner in a BVI company. He says his partner is Xi Shu, a Chinese businessman.

• Spain's wealthiest art collector, Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, a former beauty queen and widow of a Spanish steel billionaire. The Baroness uses offshore accounts to buy paintings and avoid a VAT.

• The wife of Russia's deputy prime minister. Olga Shuvalova. Her husband Igor Shuvalov has denied charges of wrongdoing about her offshore accounts.

• Mongolia’s former finance minister, Bayartsogt Sangajav established “Legend Plus Capital, Ltd” with a Swiss bank account while he served as finance minister from 2008 to 2012. Sangajav says he goofed in not declaring the money and says he is considering “resigning” from his position in the 19^th largest country in the world.

• The president of Azerbaijan and his family. A local construction magnate, Hassan Gozal, launched paper entities in the names of President Ilham Aliyev's two daughters.

The result of the BVI’s boom in offshore accounts is that the government there has sported an upscale “glass elevator” for several years so that visitors and officials alike can travel indoors in style. It has been the source of envy for U.S. Virgin Islands legislators for donkey years.

Although it has been known for decades that the BVI provides safe harbor for the “ethically challenged” investment community, the Financial Secretary in Tortola, Mr. Neil Smith, denies wrongdoing on the part of the government.

“Our legislation provides a more hostile environment for illegality than most jurisdictions,” Smith said.

Meanwhile the British Foreign Office is able to subsidize the costs of running an empire based on its cut of the $92 billion Tortola took in. Lawyers and accountants based in London also heavily benefit from these offshore accounts when they act as intermediaries.

Tortola means “land of the turtle dove” and certainly most contributors were safe and sound when the ICIJ looked under the turtle’s shell.

Secretary Smith promises that the BVI will act “swiftly and decisively” if any of “legitimately private” companies are implicated in illegal activity.

In the meantime, if Mitt really is running again in 2016 as Bob Schieffer first reported, he might be wise to move his money from the Cayman Islands to the British Virgin Islands.

Maybe by then Tortola will have turned completely turtle – locked up all the journalists who sought to expose corruption – and made the only money there that is visible the bills that drop into the ocean at the Soggy Dollar Bar.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

 

 

 

 

UNDER A BLOOD RED SKY

THE WORLD IS YOURS, KIDS!

COOKIE MONSTERS EAT BISCUITS NOW

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

The Moderate Voice

     On the eve of the blood moon, 31-year-old Steffen Lange was arrested for distributing neo-Nazi leaflets in a Brandenburg school.
     Easily not the first time a far-right activist in Germany has tried to recruit youngsters to the racist cause.
     But what made Lange different was that he was dressed as the Cookie Monster – from Sesame Street – not Sesamstrasse.
     Police arrested Lange because it is illegal to belong to a neo-Nazi organization there. A search of his Senftenberg apartment showed that he was also in possession of neo-Nazi paraphernalia that was propagandistic rather than historical – also a violation of German law.
     Computers in the Lange residence had photoshopped the image of the Cookie Monster with Adolf Hitler and admirers Forrest Gump-like under the caption: “Who ate my biscuit?”
     British newspapers speculated that the answer might be “immigrants," like the swarthy Turks who come to Germany seeking a better way of life through menial labor.
     A German police spokesman described the use of the Cookie Monster’s image as an attempt to make neo-Nazism seem “harmless and everyday and perhaps something a bit fun and a bit rebellious.”
     News photos showed neo-Nazis on a German street dressed in blue Cookie Monster suits and red Tickle Me Elmo suits handing out racist pamphlets to children.
     Meanwhile, on Easter Sunday in Henrico County, VA – not far from the state capital of Richmond – some American racists had pre-loaded plastic eggs with racist propaganda messages.
     Brandon and Jackie Smith were supervising an egg hunt with their three-year-old when they saw that some of the eggs were different than the ones they had placed near their suburban Virginia property.
     “My husband noticed the last Easter egg and I knew it wasn’t one that we put out. We opened it and it’s got the white supremacist stuff in it,” Mrs. Smith told the local ABC affiliate.
     Inside the eggs were small papers with slogans like: "Diversity = white genocide” and “Mass immigration and forced assimilation of non-whites into our lands is genocide” messages that had been shared in the social media by participants of a poorly-attended “White Man March.”
     The Nazis prized youth participation in political activity from a tender age. Hitler Youth organizations actually existed prior to Adolf Hitler assuming power in Nazi Germany.
     The question becomes why? The NSDAP wanted children to get military-style training in weapons and assault tactics from an early age – and keep them out of church and Bible groups that they thought distracted from their message of German uber-nationalism.
     One such girls group of the Hitler Youth had a yearbook entitled: “Jungen eure Welt” which loosely translated means: “It’s Your World, Kids!” An important message for budding Nazis to learn – especially in the wake of what’s happened in the Ukraine –
instructing future Nazis that international borders are mere arbitrary lines on a map –
that can be erased with a simple blitzkrieg of tanks – or as in Putin’s case – by feint of force.
    If you want to set the bar on your beer hall putsch high – telling children that the world is theirs to conquer and giving them pre-training in specific arms and marine reconnaissance is a good start. The template the neo-Nazis are using now is nothing new.
     Children get used to a fat white man with a big white beard and a red suit who promises presents in Wintertime, so the fact that brown shirts and brown pants have been traded for one-piece blue furry suits is not really a stretch. But if the Nazi-expropriated Nietzschean blond beast had the fair hair and blue eyes of a “pure Aryan” – it is difficult to see how a cloth puppet with an insatiable desire for pastries figures into their fascist plans.
     What is different is what is the same. Because in America racism has gone troll-stealth on the Internet and in private groups: in Europe the underground is composed of skinheads disguised by costume. Whereas in the 1960’s the underground were easily identified by their Bohemian long hair and beards – now the clean-cut kid sitting next to you could be a dangerous neo-Nazi.
     It’s not exactly “The Boys From Brazil,” where a fictional Ira Levin account of a surviving Dr. Josef Mengele sought to clone Hitler and recreate his life experience among 94 Stepford sons in nine different countries – even down to the age difference between Adolf’s mother and father (23 years) and the exact age his father died when he was growing up in Austria (13 years old).
     But it is something to keep an eye on. Stuttgart mayor Manfred Rommel, former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich, philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the late Prince Consort of the Netherlands Claus von Amsberg and Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI) were all members of the Hitler Youth – and they turned out OK – after Nazism was rejected.
     If your idea of conquering the world by stealth involves using six-foot-tall skinheads dressed in clown costume on a public street – you might want to think again.
     Although propaganda and show of force is a powerful one-two punch – be careful when you do it – you might just end up being hoisted by your own Putin-petard.
     Which if you know your Shakespeare means: you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 
John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

Suicide By Capital Punishment

KANSAS CITY KILLER KILLS 3 IN KKK PLAY

YET ANOTHER POINTED VICTORY FOR THE NRA
THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS


By JOHN McCARTHY

THE MODERATE VOICE


     I used to be a competitive tennis player.

     The thing about tennis – being an individual sport – is that you are not only battling your opponent – but your own head – meaning your own desire to succeed.

     I found that if you let up – even for just one point – a snowball effect of losing points was often the result – making the Sisyphean task of rolling the boulder up the mountain almost impossible.

     Which brings us quite naturally to the hate crime in Kansas City. 

     My sense is that America has just given up when it comes to gun violence. Yet we haven’t tanked just one point - but the whole game, set and match. Before we even step onto the court - we have already lost.

     The First Amendment allows all United States citizens to hate whomever they wish.

That Frazier Glen Cross spent the first 73 years of his life hating people he considered different than him – then woke up one Sunday and decided to shoot three people in the upscale suburb of Overland Park – is almost incomprehensible.

     As a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Cross professed to hate Jews and miscegenists, but after he allegedly killed one 14-year-old boy, one 53-year-old woman and one 69-year-old man outside a Kansas Jewish community center – it was later learned that none of the three murdered were Jewish.

     In what might qualify as the first case of suicide by capital punishment, Cross had a right to bear arms and a grudge – law enforcement and the Southern Poverty Law Center had been keeping tabs on "aka Glenn Miller” but were hamstrung by the fact that he had never acted upon his racist rants.

     In America it is easier to pull out a gun – than a cigarette. The Second Amendment was created by our Founding Fathers for a young nation that did not yet have a police force or an army – the right to bear arms was an insurance policy against tyranny – in the form of the British crown.

     The real tragedy – besides the three innocent people whose lives were extinguished for no reason – is that the national discussion will not naturally shift to the 33 gun-related deaths that happen every day in the United States. If 2016 Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin could accuse President Obama of trying to “exploit” the tragedy of Sandy Hook to promote gun control – then the mini-massacre in Kansas is not likely to take her attention away from "Duck Dynasty."

“Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.” So said British novelist Martin Amis who finds it strange that America was founded by Europeans, but when it established itself as an independent country it didn’t understand that one of the rules of nationhood is: the police and the military get the guns: not the people.

     Even the Yakuza in Tokyo – the Japanese organized crime syndicate – don’t dare use a gun in that island nation of 127 million people. About as many people die from gun-related violence in Japan – on a yearly basis – as the number of people who die on a daily basis from gun violence in the United States.

     Since 1968, more Americans have died from gun violence than all those who have died in our country’s wars. There have been 1.4 million firearm deaths compared to 1.2 million in war. (The number of gun-related deaths includes suicides.)

     In football they used to tell us: “no pain, no gain.” In the Virgin Islands, they have a saying: “Who knows it feels it.”

When it comes to gun violence in America – the question then becomes who is feeling the pain?

     Certainly not the gun manufacters who rack up $11.7 billion yearly ($993 million in profits) or the gun lobbies like the NRA that fight to ensure those manufacturers' rights to make that big money. Make no mistake: the NRA is about the money.

     Perhaps another British writer, William Shakespeare, said it best when he said: “Why so large a cost, having so short a lease, does thou upon your fading mansion spend?"

     We only have one life to live – and with non-peace officers carrying death in their hands in the form of pistols, rifles and machine guns – the life we have to live may be shorter than we had planned.

     You can foot fault in tennis and live to serve again – but a hand fault in illegitimate gun violence often brings a reckoning few bounce back from.

     The question is: when did we stop playing points in favor of making points?

     Thanks to the NRA, guns may always rule the roost in America - but it is a hollow-point victory.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

The More Things Change ...

http://themoderatevoice.com/193429/the-more-things-change-3/

 

OLD SCHOOL IS THE NEW SCHOOL IN TV:

AN UNBLINKERED LOOK AT THE FUTURE:

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By JOHN McCARTHY

MODERATE VOICE COLUMNIST

 

     In the movie “Truth or Dare” we got a glimpse into the future of TV.

     Only we didn’t realize it when we were watching it in real time.

     “There's nothing to say off camera," Warren Beatty complains in the 1991 film. "Why would you say something if it's off camera? What point is there existing?"

     Beatty’s irony seemed spot on then – but although he’s a gifted writer, director and actor – he couldn’t predict the future of television any more than he could figure out whether or not he should take the lead in a Quentin Tarantino flick (Kill Bill) – (he may have been right on that, though.)

     It seemed outrageous at the time to think that a celebrity – in this case Madonna  – would choose to exist only when the cameras are rolling. In a way it was contrived –

 but in another it was cinema verite – the good, the bad and the ugly of her on and off-stage life would be revealed for what it was.

     So as we are “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” we realize that 23 years later – the Material Girl had a crystal ball into the boob tube – just like the Wicked Witch in “Wizard of Oz” trying to pick up Dorothy on early GPS.

     Andy Warhol is given credit for saying that: “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” But in 1968 who could predict the future? Not Bobby Kennedy.

     Just a year after “Truth or Dare,” reality TV was born as major network television tried to stay one step ahead of the writer’s strike. We have all been survivors of the launch of Paris Hilton’s career (not the one on videotape) – and the resuscitation of a rock star who by all counts should have died before Keith Richards – Ozzy Osbourne.

     I would not have know that the Kardashians’ show even existed were it not for a stay at my sister’s house a couple years ago. Eye candy might be the answer to the question why so many of us are fascinated by the ersatz dramas dreamed up by Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kendall and Kylie.

     But Honey Boo Boo and “Duck Dynasty” prove that you don’t have to be beautiful or rich to be successful in the modern-day ratings wars – but with a parallax view of the future have we reached the saturation point of reality TV? The good people among us hope so.

     If reality TV began when Madonna was at her apex, the real good stuff came about ten years after we were introduced to “Big Brother” and MTV’s “Real World” –

maybe as a reaction to what we are already feeling today – that as more and more desperate housewives get ready for their close-ups – hopefully more and more well-written series like “Lost,” “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “House, M.D.” and “Nurse Jackie” are in the works.

     In the entertainment business, it used to be the ultimate put-down to say that a film was shot “in real time.” They were the kind of movies that made you regret spending two hours of your life stuck in a movie theater.

     Let’s hope that we have reached the point of no return when it comes to America idolizing shows that allow you to vicariously dance with the stars or show that you have talent – even though when the show’s over the majority of the contestants are still poor and not famous. Anybody can upload to YouTube a bear falling out of a tree onto a trampoline – but how many times do you want to “just press play” and watch that?

     Madonna, at the height of her career following “Truth or Dare” released a coffee table book of herself with other women in various states of undress in “Erotica” – an electric, vibrant and sometimes shocking personality reduced to an age-old still life just didn’t fly with the public – and her career stalled. Warhol, at the apogee of his fine art career turned to films and showed us where the future really lies with reality TV.

     The eight hours of a moving pictures of a static building in “Empire” demonstrates where this is all going. Do you have the patience to wait several hours for the lights to go on at the Empire State Building in New York City? (Andy also said that his movies are better talked about than actually seen.)

     As we sit riveted to our iPhones and tablets while pretending to watch what’s on TV, maybe that’s all we are doing – keeping one eye out – or an ear, so that when someone asks us about it at the office the next day we can say: “Yeah, I saw that. It was cool.” When we all know it wasn’t.

     Everyone remembers where they were when Tony Soprano blinked off on the TV screen. Our JFK moments can now happen in riveting television dramas. But they have to be good ones, not collages of sound bites that are cobbled together by editors in a production booth.

     Warhol’s artworks covered up the warts and moles of the celebrities we all know and love. His pancake makeup silkscreens told us that Leo Castelli had good bone structure – and Liza Minelli, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn were still relevant. But his “screen tests” revealed when Dennis Hopper got nervous or Bob Dylan was bored. Dan Rather said “the camera never blinks.”

     As we get closer and closer to a type of TV that Andy invented, where the filmmaker simply turns on the camera and walks away – what will that reveal about us as human beings?

     Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.

     Just like The Sopranos ending.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

A War Of Words Doesn't Have To Involve Fighting

http://themoderatevoice.com/193174/a-war-of-words-doesnt-have-to-involve-fighting/

A Global Crossing of Wildly Popular World Leaders.

The Rock Star Pope Greets The Superman President.

The View From The Virgin Islands

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist  

     President Obama met with Pope Francis last week in Rome.

     That’s when I learned that the phrase “conscientious objection” no longer means what we thought it means.

     The President sought to characterize the meeting as one between common allies, but the Vatican stressed the little differences, including what it called every person’s right to “religious freedom, life and conscientious objection.”

     To be fair, there was innuendo on each side because Mr. Obama said there was no talk of “social schisms” in the 52-minute meeting in Vatican City – schism being a word that has been used historically to describe breakaway sects of all Protestant denominations from the Roman Catholic Church.

     So there was the subtlety of diplomatic word play at work, and even the New York Times was left asking whether the Pope’s scribes meant for “conscientious objection” to refer to “an allusion to the contraception provision” of the Affordable Care Act?

     And although I don’t have a direct line to Italy as a non-excommunicated Catholic, indeed they did mean it to mean that – trust me. I thought it was a very clever use of the phrase “conscientious objection” which is a term that has been in use since World War I to describe people who wish to opt out of combat service on moral grounds.

     The United Nations Commission on Human Rights says “conscientious objectors” are “persons performing military service [who have] the right to have conscientious objections to military service."

     Muhammad Ali is one of the most famous American conscientious objectors from the Vietnam War era. I remember driving in a car to St. Michael’s Catholic School on Monday, March 8, 1971 and my cousin Delmar asking me who I thought would win “The Fight of The Century.” I said: “Muhammad Ali.” He said: “But he was a draft dodger.”

     So even in a discussion about boxing, questions and answers can quickly turn political – leaving us all to wonder if legitimate discourse is dead – we certainly hope not.

     For to equate “conscientious objection” – a phrase that has been used internationally for nearly 100 years to refer to people who choose not to fight in wars – with people who seek to impose their religious dogma on all of us – strikes me as richly disingenuous.

     It is a fair question to ask whether or not those who do not believe in allowing people to have access to contraception – have the right to impose that will on others – and also whether it is ethical to couch that issue as one of simply “opting out.”

     I say it is not merely an issue of a hospital being able to “opt out” of supplying contraception to patients, because if administrations were able pick and choose what they will offer – it would set up a two-tier system of “believers” and “non-believers” in parochial medical facilities nationwide. Who do you think would get the best service under such a system? What tier would you want to be in?

     What I thought was lacking from the rock star Pope – whom I like and admire as much as everyone from Rolling Stone to the Jerusalem Post seems to for his outreach to the poor – was a sense of the Holy Father wanting to bring everyone on board. I couldn’t help but wonder how someone who is infallible on church matters could make such an obvious team spirit faux pas? I read that he was a bouncer; maybe he never played team sports?

     Although President Obama said kind things about Ronald Reagan in his stump speeches in 2008 and 2012, it is obvious from his political agenda that he understands that “trickle-down theory” and “voodoo economics” are the same thing – and it doesn’t work no matter what you call it or how many failed Republican presidential candidates say that it will work. But when the Pope said the same thing he was branded a “Marxist” by Rush Limbaugh.

     To me, Barack Hussein Obama and Jorge Mario Bergoglio are world-beloved spiritual soul mates and I wish that the Pope had tried to cozy up a little more with the Leader of the Free World in their desk-side chat. A full-on, like-minded bromance would have been nice – since each is already spoken for when it comes to the possibility of a same sex wedding. I’m left cold with the belief that the church must no longer be crusading for new membership.

     Maybe there’s still time for their courtship to blossom – or have the bean counters at the Vatican steriley calculated that Mr. Obama will see eye to eye with them when a camel passes through eye of a needle? I still say that it never hurts to have one more enthusiastic supporter in your group.

     Since that is not an issue of church doctrine, Pope Francis can be wrong.

     And I can be right.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

 

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send questions and comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com